"Basic" English Grammar in Chinese

I have been through a hellish time trying to translate the following sentences into Mandarin. Here’s hoping some kind soul here can help…

When we make yes/no questions from statements we move the first auxiliary verb to the front of the sentence. For this I have “Deng women yao ba cong yige cun2xu3shou1ming2 gaiwei duibudui/shi bu shi de yiwenju women ba zhudongci feng zai juzi qianmian”.

The next sentence is more problematic…

When we create - wh - questions from a yes/no questions we leave the auxiliary in front of the subject and place the - wh - word in front of the auxiliary. For this I have “Deng women yao ba cong duibudui/shibushi yiwenju gaiwei yige xun4xi2yi2wen4ju4 women liu zhudongci zai zhuci qianmian lan hou ba yiwen ci zai zhu dong ci qianmian”.

What bugs me about this is that yiwen ci seems to translate “literaly” to “question word” but there are lots of words that could be considered to be question words: be, do, have, can, could, should, will…

Also zhu4 dong4 ci2 seems to work pretty well for “be” as an auxiliary but less well for “do” and “have” as auxiliaries.

And finally I have no idea how to refer to the modal auxiliaries can, could should etc…

Basically what I would like is an accurate, if somewhat convoluted, way to refer specifically to the auxiliaries (be, do, have) modal auxiliaries (can, could, should…) and the - wh words - (who, what, where, when, why, how, which).

Thanks. :notworthy:

[quote=“bob”]Basically what I would like is an accurate, if somewhat convoluted, way to refer specifically to the auxiliaries (be, do, have) modal auxiliaries (can, could, should…) and the - wh words - (who, what, where, when, why, how, which).[/quote]Bob, I’m sorry I don’t have the immediate answer you require.

I just have the rather simplistic suggestion that you might get yourself a bilingual version of a grammar book (I think Betty Azar is quite popular) and find out the appropriate Chinese terms from that.

Sorry if you’ve done this already…

Yup. That’s where I found yiwen ci!

I have asked numerous Taiwanese people if there isn’t “some” word that stands for shei, shenme, nali, shenme shihou, wei shenme, zenme, na yi ge and absolutely nothing else and the answer I get is a resounding :idunno:.

[quote=“bob”]Yup. That’s where I found yiwen ci!

I have asked numerous Taiwanese people if there isn’t “some” word that stands for shei, shenme, nali, shenme shihou, wei shenme, zenme, na yi ge and absolutely nothing else and the answer I get is a resounding :idunno:.[/quote]

I’ll submit a guess. How about 疑問代詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ci2)?

I’ll submit a guess. How about 疑問代詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ci2)?[/quote]

Thanks. I’ll submit that to my “colleagues” such as they are.

I’m guessing ci2 is “word” but what does dai4 mean?

I’ll submit a guess. How about 疑問代詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ci2)?[/quote]

Thanks. I’ll submit that to my “colleagues” such as they are.

I’m guessing ci2 is “word” but what does dai4 mean?[/quote]

Yes, 詞(ci2) means “word,” and 代 (dai4) here means “substitute for.”

名詞 (ming2ci2) is “noun.” Pronoun is sometimes written as 代名詞 (dai4ming2ci2), but more usually as 代詞(dai4ci2).

Maybe 疑問代名詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ming2ci2) is another possibility.

Bob,
I’m on the road interpreting this week, so I can’t dig through my stuff to find the right title, but there is a fabulous grammar book (actually, SEVERAL of them) that is published in both English and Chinese (parallel explanations), so don’t bother to re-invent the wheel (if you insist teaching grammar-based stuff… :smiley: ) Anyway, the title (I believe) is Grammar in Use (??). I know I bought it at Caves on Zhongshan N. Road, and the book comes in two or three levels. It’s published by one of the British companies (sorry, can’t remember…head is full of Taiwanese arms sales terms today) and it even has a section explaining the difference between British and US usages. Pretty cool and just what you’re looking for (if you can find it from this awful description!)

HTH

Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage is available in a bilingual version. The all English version’s language is quite simple and accessible considering that it includes some entries on fairly complex or abstract grammatical areas. The Chinese is just as clear. Before the bilingual version came out, we would only recommend Swan to high intermediate students who used our self-access center. Now I see a fair number of high elementary/pre-intermediate students using the bilingual version profitably.

I assume you’re making a handout for your students? And that they’re adult learners who’ll be able to follow the ideas you present?

All I would add to the preceding discussion is never underestimate the communicative power of circling words and drawing arrows. Also lots of example sentences is probably a good thing too :slight_smile:

Thanks so much kids. I will definitely try to find those bi-lingual editions. So far all I have is the Betty Shrampfer series and while the explanations are quite good IMHO the excercises seem terribly contrived. Grammar in Use looks better but I have yet to come across a Chinese version.

Oh, yes yish’ou my students are ALL adults. Are they able to understand the ideas I present? Well, they are getting better at following instructions and answering questions and they only get that “glazed” look about 25% of the time so I regard that as a good sign. I think it helps that I dump the ball back in their court a lot and try to involve methods that don’t always involve a lot of explanation. Still though I would love to be able to give quick, clear explanations of English grammatical points in Chinese. It’s turning out to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be and all the more so because I can’t read Chinese. To learn from the Chinese in Betty Shrampfer for example I have to get somebody, usually one of my students, to read it aloud and tape record or jot down the key terms. My explanations in Chinese tend to be the short version!

In addition to getting the books mentioned in this thread, you should also try to improve the teaching techniques you mentioned in your above post so that you won’t really need Chinese. That of course takes a lot of thought and practice, and it helps if you can watch experienced teachers do it, too. Explaining without, well, explaining, is an art that takes time to develop. If you’re having to use a lot of Chinese to explain grammatical concepts, then you may be teaching language that is over their heads anyway, or it may be language that can be taught through inductive, context rich approaches in the target language rather than the deductive grammar book language approach. You will find that for a lot of things, students will pick it up more efficiently through an inductive approach than through explanations in their first language.

Also, I have found that with some students, unless my Chinese is 100% on the mark when explaining grammar, they won’t fully trust my explanation and will end up going to the grammar books anyway. Before lessons, I spend more time thinking about how I can introduce language items inductively and in the target language than I do thinking about how to explain it in Chinese, and I would consider myself alright at explaining such things in Chinese. Remember that most Taiwanese students have heard the deductive explanation in Chinese in school, anyway. After students have “discovered” the language inductively, I’ll often then give them a relatively deductive explanation and tell them what heading it would fall under in a grammar book like Swan just in case they feel their understanding isn’t firm enough.

This could be because in popular parlance, the word 代名詞 (which technically means “pronoun”) is far too often used to mean “synonym”.

Thanks Jive Turkey. I’ve been teaching English for an embarassingly looong time but I’m sure I could learn lots of great methods from other teachers. I teach my own little groups that I manage to land here and there and the basic assumption I start with is that our ultimate goal is to enable them to be able to express themselves without a lot of monitor work going on. Basically I think a person can enter a communicative context and be able to express himself for one of three reasons:

  1. Because he has memorized the sentence. Things like how ya doin?, nice ta meetcha, how’s it goin? Great, good, not bad lousy… Recently I have been memorizing sentences like Zhuci biaoxian dongci de dongzuo huoshi zhuci xian xia zi xinglong zhuci and love the fact that stuff like that is there and ready to roll off the tongue.

  2. Because you just can. You dunno how you can but you can.

  3. By consciously thinking through the rules of grammar to make a sentence. This is slow laborious business and needs to be discouraged till somebody gets really stuck or keeps making the same god awful mistake. Of course this can’t be done unless the person actually knows the rules of grammar so if they don’t we need to teach them. I’m talking big picture stuff. They should know what the parts of speech are and how they can be used. They should know the differences between the verb tenses. They should know what phrases and clauses are and how they fit in a sentence. They should be able to identify the subject of a sentence for pete’s sake.

Of course 2) is our goal. We want to be able to just use the language to communicate without thinking through the rules. But how is this achieved? Personally I have come to the conclusion that 2) comes about from a combination of 1) and 3) and from mountains of roughly tuned input. Basically you memorize loads of sentences and deduce some rules from there. You study some grammar and discover whether your guesses were correct or not. You learn how to put together some sentences. You learn what people “mean” when they choose the Present Perfect rather than the Simple Past. Grammar, along with phonics and vocabulary study, increase your listening comprehension and this is where the real learning happens. Class time is convo, grammar, phonics, vocab, translation games and then they get loads of listening practice for homework. Nobody who co-operates with this basic system has EVER come back and said anything other than that their listening comprehension improved dramatically. Speaking is another story. Perhaps it’s not my forte. Anyway most students either study with me forever or throw their arms up in frustration after a couple of weeks. Either way is OK with me. You can’t please everybody.

In any case such is how things are done in the weeny world of bob.

[quote=“ploor”][quote=“bob”]Yup. That’s where I found yiwen ci!

I have asked numerous Taiwanese people if there isn’t “some” word that stands for shei, shenme, nali, shenme shihou, wei shenme, zenme, na yi ge and absolutely nothing else and the answer I get is a resounding :idunno:.[/quote]

I’ll submit a guess. How about 疑問代詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ci2)?[/quote]

First, in case it wasn’t clear, I need to say that I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. But after thinking about my suggestion and consulting a Chinese grammar written in English, I need to make a modification.

In the list of words above, they all can be 疑問詞 (yi2wen4ci2) (and they can be used in non-interrogative senses), but not all of them can be 代詞 (dai4ci2). For example, 為什麼 (wei4she2me5) never (I think) can be accurately called 疑問代詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ci2), but would be 疑問副詞 (yi2wen4 fu4ci2), an adverbial question word.

怎麼 (zen3me5) can act as either 疑問代詞 (yi2wen4 dai4ci2) or 疑問副詞 (yi2wen4 fu4ci2). (But 怎麼樣 (zen3me5yang4) is anambiguously a pronoun.)

Also, care should maybe be taken with 什麼時候 (she2me5 shi2hou4) because it sort of is an expression composed of a question word and a noun.

The Chinese terminology I’ve suggest are guesses, but I’ve verified that the terms are actually used on Chinese language websites.

A final note: be careful using my suggestions. Check with someone who knows Mandarin well. I often find it difficult to talk to Mandarin speakers about Mandarin, but once I suggest possible answers to the questions I pose to them, it seems to get the gears turning in their heads.

[quote=“ironlady”]Bob,
I’m on the road interpreting this week, so I can’t dig through my stuff to find the right title, but there is a fabulous grammar book (actually, SEVERAL of them) that is published in both English and Chinese (parallel explanations), so don’t bother to re-invent the wheel (if you insist teaching grammar-based stuff… :smiley: ) Anyway, the title (I believe) is Grammar in Use (??). I know I bought it at Caves on Zhongshan N. Road, and the book comes in two or three levels. It’s published by one of the British companies (sorry, can’t remember…head is full of Taiwanese arms sales terms today) and it even has a section explaining the difference between British and US usages. Pretty cool and just what you’re looking for (if you can find it from this awful description!)

HTH[/quote]

Ironlady, can you suggest a bilingual Chinese grammar? I would love to get my hands on one.

If Bob is trying to make analogies between Chinese and English (I don’t know if he is), I would think that having only a bilingual English grammar wouldn’t be enough. The reason I think this is because there is not a one-to-one correspondence between structures in the two languages.

Thanks ploor. I love it when people really think about my questions, but whoa are you ever working too hard here. All I need really is a way to refer to the -wh- words used as information question words. I just want to be able to explain, in Chinese, a pattern like. 1) He is swimming in the lake. 2) Is he swimming in the lake right now? I thought we were going to the movie. That bastard. 3) Why is he swimming in the lake now when he promised to take me to the movie. That bastard. 4) Hey bastard are you going to swim in the lake or take me to the movie?

I want to be able to explain that information questions (who, what, where, when, why, how question) are derived from the yes/no question in the sense that the auxiliary verb remains betweeen the -wh- word and the subject when you create such a sentence. Basically I just want them to quit saying “Why he swimming in lake. Bastard.” and I think that my being able to explain it in Chinese would help somewhat.

(Besides I’m a stubborn son of a gun if you want to know the truth and I set myself the goal of learning to talk about English grammar in Chinese some time ago so that is bloody well what I am going to do!)

Anyway, personal asides aside I am still left with the irritating fact that I have unequivocal terms for statement - cun2xu3shou1ming2, yes/no questions - dui bu dui yi1wen4ju4, or questions - huo4shi4yi1wen4ju4, information questions - xun4xi2yi2wen4ju4 “BUT” auxiliary verb - zhu4dong4ci2 seems to conjure up images of be (is am are…) better than it does do (does, did) and has (have had). And this word yi1wen4ju4 means simply question, so how can yi1wen4jci2 mean information question word (-wh- word used as a question) without at the same time refering to other words that when placed at the beginning of a sentence could also be considered question words? Do, does, did, have, has, had, can, could, should, will, may…

Anyway I’ll try yi1wen4ci2 again and see if it conjures up images of the -wh - words used as question words. If that doesn’t work I’ll try xun4xi2yi1wen4ci from xun4xi2yi2wen4ju4 (information question) or maybe zi1liao4yi2wen4ju4, literally “information question”.

And if none of these things work I’ll go with yi1wen4 san1bu4zhi1 (say I don’t know to every question)

Anyway thanks again kids. :notworthy:

Oh and ploor I believe that Ironlady did recommend a good bi-lingual grammar book. Grammar in Use I think it was. If I had known it was available in a bi-lingual version I never would have bought the Betty Schrampfer Azar series. That’ll teach me.

Hmmm…did I misread what bob wanted? I thought he wanted a grammar book (about English grammar) with explanations in Chinese. I honestly wouldn’t know about any others – haven’t taught English in some time now, although many of the books persist. :astonished:

Yes! That’s it! That’s exactly what I wanted! But you know what? I already had one in The Betty Schrampfer Series! I prostate myself before the lot of you! I am an idiot!

Here’s how I came to that realization…

I went to Caves looking for the books that Ironlady and Jive Turkey recommended. They didn’t have the one that Ironlady recommended and the one Jive turkey recommended didn’t do it for me somehow so, with the help of a Japanese gentleman I met who is doing his Phd in CSL, went back to Betty. Starting with the notion that all I wanted was for the Mandarin I spoke to conjure up images of the English that I wanted in the minds of my Chinese listeners (forgetting for a moment the question of whether it made sense to me) I conducted the following little experiment…

I approached several Taiwanese people and, after the obligatory qing wens and bu hao yisis, told them something of my little experiment and proceeded to ask them what English words they thought of when they heard the term yi2wen4ci2. The replies I got all started with the letters - wh - and none were followed by “the fuck”. So far so good I thought, and emboldened by my success so far next asked them what words they thought of when they heard zhudongci. The replies I got were be, can, a do or two, no have, but when I asked “have shi shenme ge4zong3ci2lei4” the answer I got was zhu dongci. Lovely. Exactly why this proved more difficult during class is pretty much a mystery to me but if I had to venture a guess I would say that it most likely had something to do with phases of the moon.

In any case such was the case in this case and I soon came to the conclusion that “be dongci” is considered a sub category of zhu3dong4ci2 so I am speculating that perhaps I can also say “have dongci” and “do dongci” if that ever becomes necessary. If I can now find the right terminology to distinguish the “auxilairies” be - do - have from the “modal auxiliaries” can, could, should, will etc. I’ll have this thing wrapped up, to my satisfaction at least.

So my question now is is there a word I can use to refer to be - do - have only and another one that I can use to refer to modals only? Please don’t strain yourself on this just yet. When I get somebody to help me with the Azar Series again I may well find that the answer was right there all along. :blush:

Gaah! bob, you have too much free time!!! :smiley:

But wait, wait, you haven’t heard about my difficulties with teaching the past participle!